FORESTE

Fortalecimento para Organizações rurais REsilientes e Sistemas Territoriais Ecologicamente sustentáveis / Strengthening of the resilience of environmentally sustainable Rural Organizations and Territorial Systems

Mozambique has an area of ​​80 million hectares and a population of 26.5 million people, with a literacy rate of 50.6% and a life expectancy at birth of 55 years, a malnutrition rate of 25.3% and access to safe water of 47% of the whole population. Portuguese colony for over 400 years, Mozambique was one of the last African countries to gain independence in 1975. Immediately it provoked a long and bloody civil war, which caused one million deaths and the almost total destruction of infrastructures and national economy.
Despite an average growth of GDP higher than 7% annual, in the period from 2006 to 2014 – followed however by a halving of the rate of growth in the period from 2015 to 2016 – and the presence of significant natural resources (arable land, forests, fish, water) and mining at its disposal, Mozambique remains one of the poorest and underdeveloped countries of the world, relegated to 180th place (out of 188 countries) in the Human Development Index ranking.
To describe the case Mozambique, the World Bank has specially coined the phrase “growth with poverty.” 49% of the population in fact live below the poverty line (MEF, 2015), due to inadequate infrastructures, limited and non-transparent exploitation of many natural resources, low levels of education, poor quality of health services and difficulty of access to safe water sources. Between 2015 and 2016 the structural situation of the country has been strongly afflicted by a coincidence of adverse climatic effects: drought and floods hit several provinces of the country and had a negative impact on the high rate of population vulnerability, especially those living in rural areas.

The project aims to implement an integrated production system that can reduce vulnerability to climate change in the Mocubela district, increasing and diversifying the productive agro-silvo-pastoral activities in order to improve soil conservation and the preservation of forests and mangroves, as a strategy to improve producers’ resilience and their ability to adapt. It will be possible to reduce the human pressure on natural resources for the maintenance of their role in climate change mitigation and ecosystem services provision.
The strategy is based on:

• Direct implementation of productive activities aimed at reducing carbon emissions by limiting the extension of the agricultural frontier at the expense of forest area (conservation agriculture and appropriate and sustainable technologies applied to agricultural practices).
• Activities aimed at improving the uptake of carbon for mitigating climate change (forest nurseries and mangrove), with SAF methodology (agroforestry systems), introducing appropriate technologies to improve efficiency in the use of wood for the production of coal and for domestic use (improved stoves).
• Activities aimed to improve the capacity of local actors (community members, officials and technicians of local authorities, Civil Society Organizations) in providing a rapid response to the effects of extreme events, in the analysis of economic valuation of natural resource and in the land use planning of the resources at a district level.